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The Burden of At-homeness for Palestinian Artists and Art History Generally
Abstract
A young architect asks an audience assembled in Jerusalem to learn about her country: “How can I be un-Palestinian in an international context?” Her question introduces us to the paradox at the core of my presentation. Palestinian art represents that which cannot be assumed to exist, anticipates it temporally, instantiates it spatially, and claims it affectively. Yet the architect reminds us that the people tasked with being Palestinian constantly rethink their relationship to the category, too. “Home,” thus, makes a strange word for Palestinian art. On the other hand, art makes an estranging home for Palestinians, whose ethno-nationalist self-term remains the art-world term for a person who categorically cannot appreciate art: Philistine. Perhaps the problem is neither that there is no home for Palestinians to inhabit nor such a dominant one from which they cannot escape. Perhaps these artists reveal rather the limits of art thinking, both academically and curatorially. The extreme case of Palestine’s non-place supports an interdisciplinary inquiry into the workings of imagination, materiality, and the affect of art. Drawing on fieldwork I have conducted intermittently between 1992-2018, I probe cases of art careers and artwork circulation (i.e. work of .Suleiman Mansour, Jawad Malhi, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Amer Shomali) by bringing both feminist theory and queer theory to bear on the topic. The former reveals discrimination against people by gender while the later reveals discrimination through gender. The one calls for equal access; the other for respite. Both matter. Similarly, Palestinians face discrimination for not having a proper home and want equal access to at-homeness, but they also call for rethinking home as a category entirely. What do we see when Palestinian artists are trying to create home? Is there a home for this in art history? As an anthropologist, I answer these questions by introducing audience-artwork interactions, thereby applying Palestinians’ special case to challenge standard art historical assumptions about where art lies.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Identity/Representation